The YouTube Feed Gets Bigger Thumbnails, Better Filtering

The YouTube homepage, more than the rest of the site perhaps, is in constant flux. YouTube strives to provide a homepage that will keep people coming back to it and spending more time on the site. In the latest design update, YouTube listened to the feedback and focused on usability.

The changes are common sense and are indicative of the recent trend towards a more "visual" design, i.e. bigger images, less text and superfluous design elements or, worse, whitespace.

That's especially true of the feed entries on the homepage. They now feature bigger and higher-quality thumbnails. After all, people are there for the videos and thumbnails are the easiest way of captioning the essence of the video.

Granted, video thumbnails on YouTube are abused more often than not, but there's no other alternative. YouTube is also providing more info around the videos though, details like author comments on a video and so on.

"We restructured the design to show bigger, higher-quality thumbnails. We’ve also included more information related to the video. If an uploader has commented, posted, or added a video to a playlist, we surface this information so you can get a better picture of all the activity related to the video," YouTube explained.

It also easier to control what you get in the feed, every entry now has a drop-down menu which enables you to hide that particular entry, or filter to show only uploaded videos from that channel or, finally, to unsubscribe altogether.

Another way of controlling what you see in the feed is the option to see all entries, chronologically. By default YouTube picks the "highlights" from your subscriptions. This is to make sure that channels that post one video a week get the same chance of having their videos watched as those that upload several videos a day. Now though, you can switch over to seeing everything in the feed.

Via: The YouTube Feed Gets Bigger Thumbnails, Better Filtering